While it’s true that virtually every RPG you’ll ever play will require rulings or some other human judgement, there are a few games out there that require improvised game design as part of the play experience. Or at least make it fun as hell. As I’ve written before, we’re in the midst of the Band… Continue reading Improvised Game Design
This morning I was chatting with a friend about how I actively dislike the thing in fantasy RPGs where a magic-using character’s player wants to learn a spell (in reference to this week’s post about Invisible Sun), and it lands in the GM’s lap to make that happen. It’s a really weird tic in my… Continue reading The Misery of Precedent
My alternate clickbait-y title was The Sordid Secret Small Press Scene at RinCon. I kind of wish it actually was any of those things, but it's not: we just wrapped up RinCon, a very mainstream, lovely, family-friendly gaming convention in Tucson, Arizona. And I played a bunch of small-press stuff while I was there. RinCon… Continue reading The Secret Indie Underbelly of RinCon
Matt Snyder's Dust Devils was the first RPG in the storygame style I really "got." I'm going to run it for the first time in more than a decade (!!!) at RinCon in a few weeks, so I refreshed myself on the rules the other night. It's quite a dive into the earliest ideas of… Continue reading Dust Devils: Blast from the Past
Apocalypse World introduced the word “clocks” to storygaming. Ye olde AW clocks were checklists of escalating narrative events. The MC could tick a slice of that clock and the event associated with that tick would happen. Or if the listed event happened, the MC could advance the clock to that point. AW clocks are prescriptive… Continue reading Clocks: Forged in the Dark’s Underappreciated Killer App
